I recently received the following message from a friend of mine on the moderation team. I thought I ought to spread it and let the rest of community know what is happening to us:
“
I figured out the algorithm placed on us. What
/u/spez
did is that whenever we sticky anything the post isn't blacklisted. It is marked for invisibility on
/r/all. That means the post is still there and takes up one of our slots in the algorithm on
/r/all
but is invisible to everyone. It means not only do stickied posts not get visibility; they prevent the visibility of our non-sticked posts. We tested this by removing 3 of sticked posts - following that, 3 posts immediately reached
/r/all's front page. They did far worse than what was said in Spez's "apology".
The cloak and dagger, the hidden hand, does any of this feel right to you
/r/all? Does it feel good to be benefitting from censorship?
We most certainly do ban people who speak counter to our culture. But we have always done that; it is an agreement you tacitly enter into with us by using our subreddit.
But Reddit as a whole has no disclaimer. This change is analogous to agreeing to play a game by a certain set of rules, then angrily attempting to change the rules after-the-fact when someone beats you by playing according to the rules. It is not in the spirit of fairness or of free discourse, especially for a site that was conceived as a "bastion of truth on the Internet".